When she sneaked into the kitchen, her parents were leaning over the table, staring at the open pages of the funeral brochure, her mother’s finger resting on one of the coffins while her father looked over her shoulder, hand clamped over his mouth. They might have been working on a crossword.

It happened in the middle of a frozen night in February 1991 as I lay alone on a bed in Duisburg, deep beneath the glow of Germany’s steel mills and chemical plants and slipping further into a nocturnal region that I could name only years later. New colleagues had returned to their families at five, leaving me, the trainee, to another long evening that pulled itself over a drab suburb like a heavy grey sheet; some nights I’d venture behind the lace curtain of a local pub only to spend a soundless hour at the bar. This night I put my ear to a small black radio and edged the needle millimetre by millimetre down the line of European cities, hoping for life in Lille, Luxembourg, Malmö, Hamburg, Dresden, anywhere, finding nothing but news until, at once, a hero’s voice and tinny beat broke through the hiss above the North Sea and carried me back to a place I had lost, reminded me who I was, and as the song faded away again, I pushed back the covers, reached out from the bed, fumbled for my diary and scribbled one line in the dark: “It’s going to be alright.”

Where is the beauty in human suffering? In 2016 two very different films searched for answers at the border between intimacy and intrusion. By revealing so much of their protagonists’ pain they strayed towards voyeurism, but instead found truth.

“They told us our gods would outlive us
They told us our dreams would outlive us
They told us our gods would outlive us
But they lied.”

Nick Cave, Distant Sky

Until now, I’d always believed that 1989 would remain the towering landmark of my lifetime – a year that saw an old world crumple to its knees while a new one, younger and better, sprang to its feet.

1989: a number whose gentle curves cannot contain the volumes of history that poured out of Europe in twelve months and a single night when, with a reverential sense of timing, brave Berliners brought down their Wall 200 years after their Parisian cousins had stormed the Bastille. We watched people refuse division, demand freedom and then seize it with their own bare hands. We watched them hugging and kissing and dancing, and we felt part of it. That was when I fell in love with Europe.

Relaxed and elegantly coiffed in his warm television studio, Brian Clough shares his genius with the nation. On this gloomy London night, England must beat Poland to reach football’s World Cup finals. The opposition are certainly no pushovers, they offer a little more skill and flair than most teams from the Soviet bloc, but the brilliant mind of Brian has uncovered a weakness in the Polish side: “That clown at the other end of the pitch,” he says of the Polish goalkeeper, drawing uncomfortable frowns from the other pundits sat around the table.

Our world is enclosed around itself, enclosed around us, and there is no way out of it. Those in this situation who call for more intellectual depth, more spirituality, have understood nothing, for the problem is that the intellect has taken over everything. The limits of that which cannot speak to us – the unfathomable – no longer exist. We understand everything, and we do so because we have turned everything into ourselves.

Sooner or maybe much later we will defeat IS, but this is not what is truly at stake. When that particular gang of criminals is finally worn down, another will spring up to take its place. If we haven’t learnt this over the last two decades, we never will.

At these moments of shock and sorrow, we ritually appeal to our values. This is all very well but it’s starting to ring hollow or at least a little weary. This is because that very appeal captures neither the scale nor the urgency of the task we face.

So what is truly at stake? In one word and an entire universe that lies behind it: freedom. Not the freedom to do this or the freedom to do that. But freedom in all its unique simplicity.

Christmas arrives a week early this year. Disciples spanning three generations will converge on cinemas from Bombay to Boston to witness the seventh instalment of this planet’s favourite space saga. If a two-minute trailer can ignite the sort of fervour we saw this week – the faithful beheld mysterious images that foretold the Good News, and they were pleased – we can only wonder what forces Star Wars will awaken when the film reaches our screens.